Sub-barrier peaks in atom-atom-ion three-body recombination
Abstract
Hybrid atom-ion experiments have recently entered the few-partial wave regime in which magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances dominate the three-body loss dynamics. This necessitates a treatment of three-body recombination that can incorporate the role of the resonant dimer channel. Here, we develop a two-step Lindemann-type model for resonant atom-atom-ion three-body recombination that combines multichannel quantum-defect theory for the long-range polarization potential with a universal quantum-capture treatment of the inelastic atom-dimer step. We show that within our model, rate competition can lead to a peak in the three-body-recombination cross section of higher partial-wave channels at energies well below their corresponding centrifugal barrier. Investigating the resulting loss rates under numerically obtained non-thermal collision-energy distributions, we find that these effects survive the energy averaging and can be observed in state-of-the-art hybrid experimental setups. Our findings pave the way for a detailed characterization of atom-ion Feshbach resonances via the analysis of inelastic three-body-recombination processes.
Related
- Effective atom-dimer bands of three-body lattice systems at strong coupling: exact critical mass ratios and a statistics-quasimomentum duality
- Lowering the implementation barrier of neutral-atom quantum computing with agentic workflows
- Crossing the 12,000-atom barrier with heterogeneous quantum-classical supercomputing: quantum chemistry of protein-ligand complexes
- Nonthermal Dynamics of a One-dimensional Rydberg-atom Chain with Constraint Four-body Interactions
- Generation of arbitrary quantum states in cavity-atom systems with a three-level ancilla
BibTeX
@misc{thielemann2026subbarrier,
title = {{Sub-barrier peaks in atom-atom-ion three-body recombination}},
author = {Fabian Thielemann and Joachim Siemund and Tobias Schaetz and Krzysztof Jachymski},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.04106},
eprint = {2609.04106},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04106},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Sub-barrier peaks in atom-atom-ion three-body recombination
AU - Fabian Thielemann
AU - Joachim Siemund
AU - Tobias Schaetz
AU - Krzysztof Jachymski
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.04106
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04106
AB - Hybrid atom-ion experiments have recently entered the few-partial wave regime in which magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances dominate the three-body loss dynamics. This necessitates a treatment of three-body recombination that can incorporate the role of the resonant dimer channel. Here, we develop a two-step Lindemann-type model for resonant atom-atom-ion three-body recombination that combines multichannel quantum-defect theory for the long-range polarization potential with a universal quantum-capture treatment of the inelastic atom-dimer step. We show that within our model, rate competition can lead to a peak in the three-body-recombination cross section of higher partial-wave channels at energies well below their corresponding centrifugal barrier. Investigating the resulting loss rates under numerically obtained non-thermal collision-energy distributions, we find that these effects survive the energy averaging and can be observed in state-of-the-art hybrid experimental setups. Our findings pave the way for a detailed characterization of atom-ion Feshbach resonances via the analysis of inelastic three-body-recombination processes.
ER -